


Still

by Fly



Category: Metal Gear
Genre: Ficlet, M/M, MGS4
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-02-04
Updated: 2010-02-04
Packaged: 2017-10-07 00:57:05
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 401
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/59631
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Fly/pseuds/Fly
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>She'd proven her identity by sending a picture of him, naked.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Still

She'd proven her identity by sending a picture of him, naked.

It's not a very good photograph, in terms of either picture quality, artistry or resemblance to the subject. It's probably not even a photograph - it looks more like a still from a camera feed, melting shades of white and pink and red and black, timestamp in the corner. It's blurry and pixellated as hell, because back then that was the dose of Vaseline smeared on the world's lens, making the old look ten years younger - not like these days, when every crease and vein and fold of skin is in shocking HD and there's no way anyone can imagine it away.

But it's of him, and it shows him sitting on sitting on the side of a bed, or something - it's hard to make out, just a brushstroke on a black canvas behind him. His head is bowed slightly forwards, and his shoulders curve out behind his neck like a bull's. One hand is rested on his thigh, the other on his knee, holding the cigarette, mushrooming smoke to the sky in imitation of the worse kind of cancer stick. He is very, very naked and his thighs are wide apart.

After making sure everyone else is asleep, or occupied, or uncaring, Hal who's still Otacon to one person in the world forces himself to open the file. While over the years he'd kept his frustration at bay with a few incredibly strange images and ideas and people, even he wouldn't get turned on by a two-gens-old screenshot of his best friend with no clothes on. But there's something, about the way his stomach is curled backwards so that it catches the light, that makes him interested in the picture in a way beyond the hope that it represents. Hal finds that after these years he has trouble imagining Snake stripped bare of all his old trappings, planted in front of a camera, posing there clean, and naked, and new - sometime since, the old man's life had just turned into an endless forced repeat and now he brings all that weight and expectation everywhere with him. It's the worst nostalgia Hal's ever had, and he can't help himself from taking a backup.

He keeps it in his Printer Settings folder for two days, in an unmarked archive, disguised as a batch process, before he finally puts it in the Trash.


End file.
